The National Book Awards (US): the best-written work on the fiction shortlist

Plus the best-written previous winner

COMING SOON:

—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes. To avoid sending you too many posts, we’ll leave the recent releases until December.

—TOMORROW: Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here, restacks of which would be appreciated.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over’: the best-written work on this year’s shortlist for the National Book Award for fiction. The winner will be announced on the 20th of November.

—’According to the telephone (for perhaps I did listen in once…